Let money do the work

It was a while back that I attempted to run MetaTrader on Mac. A couple of years past and some new options available warrant a new post. This time I’m using a porting tool called Wineskin. It is based on Wine, same as Codeweavers Crossover we tried last time. Let’s get straight to pros and cons.

Interest rates of central banks directly affect currency exchange rates. More precisely, exchange rate of a currency pair is affected by the ratio of two interest rates and the change of this ratio. Current central bank rates for most of traded currencies are widely present on the internet.

The matters get a bit more complicated though if you want to analyze historic interest rate data. Central banks of different countries have different regulations and names for their base rates and sometimes their policies change. This article will help you to clarify the subject and gather the history of central bank rate changes for the most popular currencies – USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, CHF, CAD, AUD и NZD.

If you use Metatrader platform for price behavior analysis, especially if you tend to rely on fundamentals, quite often you may want to see some external data along the price on a chart. Let’s say, for a example, you want to examine possible correlation between exchange rate of a currency pair and its respected interest rate difference, or use this data as a confirmation for your entries in some way. This article shows you step by step how to create an indicator displaying time series data from an external file using MQL4 language.

So, we’ve got MetaTrader 4, excellent free application, yet with one small deficiency. It runs exclusively on Windows. Installing emulation and virtualization software is always a trade off and not everything may go smooth. Here we are going to look at a solution of running MetaTrader 4 on Mac OS X (10.5 Leopard), nevertheless almost everything in this article is applicable to other operating systems (like Linux and Solaris) as well as any other applications.

Speaking of Windows on Mac two options usually come to mind, Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. If this is the case for you I would recommend visiting MacWindows.com first, to see for yourself that the choice is quite broad in fact. Following that, I’m going to describe my own experience in approaching the subject.